The basics of maintaining a website

Owning a website comes with certain responsibilities. You can’t just build it and forget it. Well you can, but regular website maintenance is a must if you want your site to be successful. Regular maintenance can:

  1. Keep your site secure. Websites get hacked, and hacked sites lose visitors and traffic.
  2. Prevent you from losing everything by keeping a regular backup schedule.
  3. Prevent disgruntled users because something doesn’t work or you provided a broken link.
  4. Keep regular visitors happy by giving them fresh, updated information and exciting news.

There are all kinds of things that need to be done when maintaining a website. Whether you decide to do these yourself or hire out the work, it still needs to be done.

Here’s a quick list to get you going on keeping your website humming:

Keep secure: monitor for malware, viruses, hackers, and errors

Hackers don’t usually announce themselves on the front page of your website. You could be infected and not even know that your site is being used to send spam emails or links to nefarious parts of the web. Setting up a regular monitoring service will ensure that if you do get infected or have site errors, you can fix them fast.

Keep a regular backup schedule

Backing up your site is something that should be done regularly, especially for those who update their site often. Things happen. Do not expect your web host to be keeping a scheduled backup for you. While they may be, it could be old, and not on track with your latest site updates. If the server crashes for some reason, or your site gets hacked, or you make some major mistake, your edits could be gone.

Keep updated: Software

Most websites are built on a content management system, which means it’s software that can potentially be exploited. We use WordPress for many reasons, but one is that it’s constantly being updated, improved, and made more secure. When WordPress releases a new version, it’s a must to update your site. Failing to do this leaves you vulnerable. Plugin updates should be treated in the same way – all software updates are a form of protection.

Keep updated: Content

This isn’t strictly a maintenance issue, but we feel it’s so important to keep your site fresh and updated on the content front that we’re including it. A regular blogging or publishing schedule that pushes out relevant content will keep your returning visitors happy and engaged. The search engines will like you a whole lot more too. If there was one piece of SEO advice we had to give it’s this: Publish relevant content, and publish it often.

There’s a few other tasks that we should mention too:

  • Check for broken links – nobody likes broken links. Nobody.
  • Check site speed. A fast site is a good site.
  • Track your site statistics. We set up Google Analytics on every site we build, but if you don’t check you don’t know.

 

What’s next?

We’ll be continuing to publish articles about maintaining websites. Follow along here: Web Maintenance

If you’re too busy running your own show and need website help and support, we’d be glad to help. Check out our maintenance and support service.

16 Comments

  1. alive on February 5, 2015 at 1:44 am

    clearly explained. thank you

  2. John Williams on March 16, 2017 at 11:29 pm

    Thank You, Bryan Hoffman, For the Interesting Blog on Website Maintenance.

  3. Oluwaseun Joto on March 22, 2017 at 5:44 am

    Thank you. This information is very vital.

  4. Paula Reber on May 1, 2017 at 10:45 am

    Do you also build websites? What is your fee for this and also maintainence? Thank you

    • Bryan Hoffman on May 5, 2017 at 10:35 am

      Yes we do build websites. The fee is based on the scope of the project. Drop us a line if you want to know more.

    • Sally Alter on April 26, 2021 at 7:29 am

      I am just starting out a book business on Kindle and am organizing a website. I need to know what is expected of me, in order to keep it up to date. I am not great on technology. SallyAlter

  5. Mike on October 4, 2017 at 1:05 pm

    Great information, we use Internet Solutions For Less for website maintenance services in case you need help, their work is awesome.

  6. Ruby Gabbert on November 9, 2017 at 1:24 am

    Great Tips. I liked your blog alot. Thank you for sharing such a good stuff with us.

    • Bryan Hoffman on November 9, 2017 at 9:02 am

      No problem Ruby, glad you liked them. Thanks for stopping by!

  7. dioswarie abella on April 11, 2019 at 2:32 am

    hi ! can you please teach us how to build a server for website. and how we can secure the websites.

    • Bryan Hoffman on May 13, 2019 at 10:58 am

      Sorry no, that’s way beyond the scope of this article. Cheers.

  8. Donald Collins on November 4, 2019 at 2:51 am

    Nice article pal! I’d like to add one more tip to your list that is clean and optimize your database time to time to keep it web optimized.

    • Bryan Hoffman on November 4, 2019 at 9:28 am

      Great idea Donald, thanks for your thoughts!

  9. Darell on March 8, 2020 at 6:16 pm

    Can you tell us more about this? I’d like to find out some additional information.

  10. Edwin on April 29, 2020 at 2:18 am

    I got some insights and i was looking for the same data thank you for sharing

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